Calico Early Man Site

Calico Early Man Site, in the Calico Hills near Barstow, sits within the ancient sediments of Lake Manix in the Manix Basin, where hundreds of thousands of years of Quaternary deposits and Ice Age animal fossils are exposed. The site became famous after Louis Leakey began excavations there in 1963, arguing that thousands of chipped chalcedony stones were human-made tools more than 100,000 years old. If true, they would have placed people in North America far earlier than accepted. Most archaeologists, however, concluded the stones were naturally broken geofacts, and the site is now chiefly significant for the controversy it stirred in American archaeology.

Yermo, California · United States